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If you have a large IBM System p environment with several HMC's it can be challenging to find which HMC manages any given LPAR.
It is usually possible to find out the HMC that manages the LPAR from the actual LPAR using the lsrsrc IBM.ManagementServer command (or lsrsrc IBM.MCP on AIX 7), however this has a couple of drawbacks. The biggest drawback is if you are getting paged in the middle of the night because an LPAR just went down, you are obviously not going to be able to login to the LPAR to run this... [More]

I would recommend never using the LPAR console from the HMC web interface. It has some serious drawbacks such as the connection being in clear text over the network and issues with copying/pasting and other interface issues (nothing compares to PuTTY :) ) The alternative is using the HMC command line. From there you have 2 options, using the "mkvterm" command or the menu based "vtmenu". vtmenu is a good option, however if you don't know which managed system the LPAR is on you can spend some time looking around for... [More]

If you are anything like me, there has been several times over the years where you have said "Argh! If only I could make a VIO server a VSCSI client of another VIO server!" There are a couple of scenario's where this could be particularly useful: #1 - Setting up a VIO server as a Virtual Optical client of another VIO server. This would be super useful for upgrades, rebuilds, disaster recovery, etc. of your VIO servers. In a dual VIO environment you could have each VIO server be a client of the other VIO server for optical. Check... [More]

Let me start by saying I am a huge fan
of Power Systems, and this posting is just meant as constructive
criticism to make a great platform even better. Here are 6 things in
my opinion IBM could do to improve AIX and Power Systems.
But first, let me mention a couple of
things that in my opinion they have recently done right. #1 -
including OpenSSH in the AIX 7.1 base media. And #2 - Including nmon
by default in all recent versions of AIX. Thank you for now
including both of these, they are both great tools that every... [More]

Creating LPAR configurations from the HMC GUI can be slow and inefficient. I prefer to use the HMC command line "mksyscfg" to create LPAR's. The output of the "lssyscfg" (List system configuration) command is almost the same as the input to the "mksyscfg" (make system configuration) command. Below are a couple of 1-line commands for the HMC that will transform the output of "lssyscfg" in to a useable "mksyscfg" command line. This allows some interesting possibilities: If you need to... [More]

I've always wanted to be able to write and run scripts directly on the HMC instead of having to setup SSH keys and run scripts from another server. Using the SSH keys from another server is OK, but it adds complexity, and can really slow things down if you need to run a lot of HMC commands (for example when iterating over every LPAR in every frame and running multiple commands per LPAR). Also, at some companies it might be difficult to get permission to setup SSH keys for the HMC. I've found a method that allows you to write and run... [More]

The HMC command line interface is awesome for scripting. However, for day to day administrative tasks it can be hard to use due to the long command line syntax for most commands. I have been using the HMC command line for years, and nearly anytime I want to use a command I have to reference the manual page to lookup the syntax. I wanted to be able to use the HMC command line for common day to day administrative tasks, so I created a script called EZH - The Easy HMC Command Line Interface. For more info, see: the EZH Sourceforge website ... [More]

The HMC provides the "viosvrcmd" command to run VIO commands from the HMC. Here are a couple of reasons you might want to do this: If you are building a LPAR from the HMC command line you can throw the commands in there to map VSCSI disks, create SSP LUN's, or map VFC adapters all right from the HMC command line. If you have SSH keys setup to your HMC, but not to each of your VIO's, you can use the SSH keys to connect to your HMC and run the viosvrcmd to connect to the VIO servers. This enables you to run command on your VIO... [More]

I've been working a script that compares the running configuration of an LPAR to its saved profile and generates a report of the differences. Any time a server is shut down and then reactivated there is a potential for problems. If changes were DLPAR'd in to the LPAR while it was running and not saved to its profile, the next time it is shut down and restarted it might have the wrong amount of resources or might not even boot. Troubleshooting a non-booting LPAR in this state is very difficult. Profiles and the running configuration get... [More]

The HMC restricted shell doesn't include the "ps" or "uptime" commands which are sometimes very helpful when troubleshooting issues. Below are a couple of methods to list running processes and find the HMC uptime. List Running Processes The HMC is based on Linux, and the Linux kernel stores information about running processes under /proc. Each running process has a process ID number (PID) and information about each PID is available at /proc/<pid>. Based on this, we can create a primitive "ps"... [More]

Recently I've been spending a lot of time working on EZH - the "Easy HMC Command Line Interface". For those of you not familiar with EZH, it is a script for the HMC that provides a very simple and easy to use interface to the HMC command line so that you can very quickly, efficiently, and easily complete day to day administration tasks from the command line. It is very easy to install and doesn't require any modifications to the HMC (the script runs within the restricted HMC shell). I released a new version today with many... [More]

Here is a method you can use to reset a lost VIO padmin password from the HMC with zero downtime on the VIO server. This is a somewhat involved process, but much easier than having to take a downtime on the VIO server to change the password. This is a very challenging task because the viosvrcmd HMC command doesn't allow the command run on the VIO server to have a pipe ("|"), or any redirection ("<", ">") and doesn't allow for interactive input. So this rules out using something like "chpasswd"... [More]

A new version of prdiff is available that now includes support for Virtual Fibre Channel / NPIV and also improved dedicated CPU support. For those of you unfamiliar with prdiff it is a script that compares running LPAR configurations with their profiles and shows differences. This can prevent issues when you are shutting down and rebooting LPAR's. For more info, see http://prdiff.sourceforge.net/

A new version of prdiff was released today. This is the tool that will compare your LPAR running configuration with the profile and report differences. For more info and to download: http://prdiff.sourceforge.net/ New features in this version: Improved Virtual Slot differences display. Virtual slots are first
compared on the slot number, and then on the rest of the fields. So if
a virtual adapter has the same slot number in the profile and in the
running configuration it will be on the same line in the output, if any
of the... [More]

I'm very excited to announce that version 1.0 of EZH has been released today. For those of you who aren't familiar with EZH, it is a script that provides an alternate command line interface for the HMC that makes working on the HMC command line much, much easier, and also adds a lot of additional functionality to the HMC command line interface that is not natively there. It also includes an optional interactive menu. It is extremely simple to install and use, and is free and open source software. For more information and to download,... [More]